I&A Campaign: sound component

Evaluation Criteria
I do not expect the sound components of the I&A Campaign to attain the quality level of a professionally produced piece of audio. Composing in audio format is a new experience for most of you, so a high level of difficulty is normal and should be expected.
Remember, you have been writing essays and research papers for roughly 10 years or more and are still not a professional at those written genres, so as a class we can’t expect to develop 10 years of audio experience in less than one semester. As students the goal in any class is to practice developing skills and to gain knowledge that will allow you to perform better next time. Perfection is not the goal. This is why the project analysis is a critical piece of the I&A assignment. I am interested in what you learned by completing the project and in what your intended outcome was even if your actual audio did not realize your intentions due to technical difficulties and beginner status with the medium (audio) and genre (the interview, audio essay, or public service announcement). Thus, I expect your audio to be complete but not seamless in its execution; that is, I expect it to be 30 seconds (PSA) to 3 minutes (essay or interview) with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end and I expect you to be able to articulate your intentions, choices, and composing process in the project analysis paper.

Audio Details

The genre and topic for the sound component  is up to you and your group. The only restrictions are that the finished project show evidence of editing, use more than one form of sound as categorized in McKee’s article “Sound Matters” (i.e., the project cannot be all music, all sound effects, etc.), and that it fulfill the rhetorical purpose you outline in your design plan.

In class we will discuss techniques and best practices for interviewing and editing audio. Here are some basic guidelines:

• If you are interviewing someone, schedule your interview early on in the project. This way you will have time to schedule and conduct a follow-up interview if necessary or scrap the interview altogether and start over if something goes wrong.
• Write interview questions ahead of time. It is good practice to have a set of interview questions to guide your conversation even if you end up straying from those scripted questions. In fact, you should be prepared to ask extemporaneous follow-up or tangential questions based on the responses of your interviewee. A question can be as open as “Tell me what a typical day at work is like?” or as detailed as “How old were you when you when you got your first paying job and where did you work?”
• As a point of ethics, you may want to give your planned questions to your interviewee ahead of time and give him or her the right to veto questions. This can put an interviewee at ease and give them a sense of ownership over the interview process. You should also explain, ahead of time, that the finished audio will be posted on your personal website—that is, it will be public. For particularly sensitive topics, you may want to use a pseudonym for your interviewee and take other precautions to conceal his/her identity. These are issues you should discuss with your interviewee well before the actual interview.
• Before recording your audio (except an interview), you should write out a script. The script will ensure that what you say sounds professional and will save you time in the long run. Even if you conduct and interview, you will need some form of recorded introduction to the interview, so that your listeners know who you are interviewing, why, and what s/he talks about in the interview. Remember that in general spoken text is harder to follow than written text where the reader can read a sentence several times if necessary. When listening, the audience has to be able to take in a sentence the first time. Thus audio usually requires shorter sentences and pauses before and/or after key points to allow the listener time to process the idea.
• Even though your finished audio will only be 30 seconds to 3 minutes, your unedited audie should be significantly longer: 10 to 30 minutes depending on the genre you choose.
• When using music and sound effects, always ask yourself “How does this contribute the purpose of this audio piece?” It is easy to fall into the trap of using your favorite song or a particular sound effect because it is cool or personally meaningful to you, without considering how it contributes to your rhetorical agenda.
• Don’t worry about making aural mistakes during and interview. Umms, ahhs, pauses, and other “mistakes” can be eliminated during the editing process if you so desire. Try to conduct interviews as a conversation and not a cross-examination. If you make a mistake in reading from a script, remember that you don’t have to start completely over, but can just go back to the closest transitional sentence.
• Always do an audio test before beginning your interview to make sure the recorder is working and that the sound levels are appropriate. With the Zoom H2 recorders you can check out, it is best to wipe and reformat the memory card before you begin.
• Always keep your original interview audio preserved and backed up in several locations (i.e., on your computer’s hard drive, on your flash/thumb drive, on a CD) so that if you have any technical problems you can always return to your original material and start over.
• When using Audacity, always begin a work session by opening your project and doing a “Save As.” rename the project with an increasing number in the file name each time you open the project to work on it. (e.g., carrie_audio2.aup, carrie_audio3.aup, carrie_audio4.aup). Occasionally Audacity files become corrupted, and if you create a new version each time you work at worst you will lose an hour or two of work rather than weeks of work. For more tips on using Audacity, see the post “Audacity Activity.”

Resources
Audacity
Audacity is a free, open-source program for editing and recording sounds; this is the program you learned to use in class. Go to the “Downloads” page and be sure to choose the correct version for your operating system (choose the “stable” version and NOT the “beta” version). Also download the “LAME MP3 Encoder”; a link to this is listed under “Optional Downloads” on the download page. You need the LAME MP3 encoder to create MP3 files. You can also download a portable version of Audacity to carry with you on you flash/thumb drive. The portable version is available on the network drive in our classroom and in Eddy 300.

Five Minute Fears
Here are some short, scary audio stories—just in time for Halloween. These us fun sound effects and vocals.

This American Life
TAL is a public radio program that broadcasts shows incorporating various genres including interviews, short stories (fiction & non-fiction), and news magazine style journalism. You can listen to past episodes on the website and subscribe to the podcast or listen live on 91.5 FM KUNC the local public radio station to hear current episodes. If you visit the website’s “About Our Radio Show” page you can learn more about the program’s history and purpose. Here’s a taste:

One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. So usually we just say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun.

Radio Lab
Radio Lab is an hour long audio program, usually on a topic related to the social sciences, that uses interesting and complex sound techniques.

This I Believe
This I Believe is an audio essay project. At the website you can read and listen to archived essays. According to the website:

This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing and sharing essays describing the core values that guide their daily lives. More than 70,000 of these essays, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here on our website, heard on public radio, chronicled through our books, and featured in weekly podcasts. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.

StoryCorps
StoryCorps is national project that records families and friends interviewing each other. The website describes the project this way:

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to take home and share, and is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our award-winning broadcasts on public radio and the Internet. StoryCorps is the largest oral history project of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

Additional audio clips for specific consideration
From StoryCorps:
Lauren Vincelli interview her parents
Mary Caplan talks about her brother’s death

From Poems that Go:
While Chopping Red Peppers

From This American Life:
Episode 110: Mapping (sound section starts at about 12:40)

From On the Media:
Pulling Back the Curtain